Native Ecosystems Council (NEC) is a Montana-based nonprofit fighting to protect wildlife habitat from logging on America’s public lands. The organization was founded in 1992 by Sara Johnson, Ph.D., a wildlife biologist who saw firsthand the havoc that timber extraction operations wreak on wildlife while working for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) in Montana’s Gallatin National Forest. “Logging is devastating for all wildlife,” Johnson, NEC’s director, says. “Out here in Montana we have the threatened grizzly bear, the threatened Canada lynx, and the threatened wolverine, but we’re slowly losing them.” Logging also exacerbates the effects of climate change, raising surface temperatures, disrupting water cycles, and hindering the planet’s ability to store carbon dioxide. NEC defends forest ecosystems across Montana and the rest of the American West by submitting public comments opposing proposed logging projects and, when necessary, pursuing litigation. “We serve wildlife,” Sara Johnson says. “We speak for wildlife. We are their voice.”
“Logging is devastating for all wildlife,” says Sara Johnson, Ph.D., NEC’s founder and director. Photo: Vera Kratochvil (public domain)
With only one full-time staff member, NEC is a woman-led nonprofit that has been protecting wildlife for over thirty years. In the last year alone, NEC’s legal advocacy work has safeguarded several million acres of wildlife habitat in the western United States. In July 2024, NEC won a lawsuit opposing the USFS’s “Aspen Restoration Project,” which sought to fell 147,000 acres of aspen and conifer forests in Utah’s Ashley National Forest. In December 2024, NEC partnered with the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, among other conservation groups, to file suit against the USFS’s “Manti-La Sal Restoration and Fuels Reduction Project,” which called for the logging, mastication, and burning of 952,115 acres of grizzly bear, lynx, and wolverine habitat in Utah’s Manti–La Sal National Forest. The lawsuit proved successful when, in June 2025, the Forest Service pulled the project. In June 2025, NEC won another lawsuit combating the USFS’s “Greenhorn Project,” preserving 17,000 acres of wildlife habitat in Montana’s Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest from logging and road building.
Aspens grow in Utah’s Manti–La Sal National Forest. Photo: Zephyr Glass (public domain)